CSU Project #: 5-31250
Sponsor: NOAA
Primary Investigator: Dr. Clifford Matsumoto
Start Date: July 1st, 2011
End Date: June 30th, 2014

• Implementation of EnKF for air quality prediction.
• Collaboration to provide for more effective real-time collaboration between NWS operational units and forecasters and partners.
• Develop advanced features for an interactive weather forecasting workstation.
• Continue to add new functionality and data sources to MADIS; provide support to the user community; and augment existing networks.
• Aid efficiency in transitioning MADIS processing from ESRL/GSD to National Weather Service operations.
• Administer the Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP).
• Geo-Targeted Alerting System (GTAS) - Meet FEMA requirements to provide air dispersion and toxic plume information along with NOAA meteorological and environmental data to state and local emergency management agencies.
• Combine existing warning tools used in the current AWIPS by forecasters into a newly defined warning system (Integrated Hazard Information Services (IHIS))
• Transition the Aviation Tools software/systems support to the Systems Support Group in the ITS branch of GSD under the Aviation Initiative (AI) Project.
• Transition the Aviation Tools software/systems support to the Systems Support Group in the ITS branch of GSD under the Traffic Management Unit (TMU) Project of the FAA PACE effort.
• Transition the Aviation Tools software/systems support to the Systems Support Group in the ITS branch of GSD under the Volcanic Ash Coordination Tool (VACT) Project.
• Research objectives related to LAPS continues to be the improvement and enhancement of the system in providing real-time, three-dimensional, local-scale analyses and short-range forecasts for domestic and foreign operational weather offices, facilities, and aviation and other field operations.
• Research Collaboration with Information and Technology Services
• Network Enabled Weather (NNEW) Program - Make advancements to the NextGen Testing Portal; participation in the Fiscal Year 2011 Capabilities Evaluation (CE) at the FAA's William J Hughes Technical Center; contribute to Quality of Service report.
• Continue supporting FX-Net while conducting research and development to add FX-Net functionality to the AWIPS II CAVE and to port the remote CAVE code to the Windows OS platform.
• Maintain existing system capabilities for USFS, BLM and Dept. of Agriculture National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) Predictive Services Fire Weather forecasters.
• Wavelet Data Compression Research and Applications - Enhance performance and efficiency of the compression software; enhance the functionalities of the compression software to deal with data sets with various topologies and formats; evaluate the impact of the lossy data computation to the data sets which will be used in further numerical computations.
• NWS NextGen 4D Data Cube - Conduct research into the technology and science of populating a four-dimensional airspace with atmospheric data, extraction methodologies, distribution formats and input mechanisms to be used by aviation decision support systems; support NWS 4D Data Cube prototypes, demonstrations and capability evaluations; support Program Manager and develop program plans, personnel resource allocations and budgets for research and development projects; participate in the the Open Geospatial Consortium.
• Provide key technical support to the Science on a Sphere project, particularly research into effective user interfaces for the system, new visualization techniques, and new data sets.
• Identification, recovery, cataloguing, and central archiving of sounding data from field campaigns going back to the 1950s.
• Assist the NOAA NextGen Weather Program and the Aviation Weather Testbed in Kansas City, MO with developing, testing, and transitioning promising aviation weather research to operations in the National Weather Service.
• Weather Satellite Data and Analysis Equipment and Support for Research Activities - Earthstation operations and maintenance for antennas, telemetry, ingest, processing, and archive; data collection and distribution of All GOES, MSG2, and 26 project products; data arrchive via DVD media and online RAID storage.
• Examine and evaluate various issues associated with model initialization and cycling process and to, hopefully, improve these processes.
• Collaborate with ESRL meteorologists with the objective of running the Non-hydrostatic Icosahedral Model (NIM) at sub 5KM global resolution.
• Collaborate with the Developmental Testbed Center Ensemble Team (DET) to modify WRF Portal to support running complex WRF ensembles on the GSD Jet and TACC Ranger supercomputers. They will also continue to develop, improve, and support WRF Portal, FIM Portal, and WRF Domain Wizard.
• Coordinate: NOAA/NIST coupled fire weather/fire behavior modeling activities; ingest of experimental models into operational systems and collaborative field studies; fire weather modeling and decision support tools research with NWS, University, US Forest Service and BLM fire weather researchers and users. Formally respond to the NOAA Science Advisory Board’s Fire Weather Research ‘A Burning Agenda’ report and recommendations. Conduct model downscaling research, investigate the use of high resolution ensemble models in US Forest Service operations, and develop web interface tools for model initiation and data delivery.
• Generate and manage graphics in suport for the Flow-following Finite-volume Icosahedral Model (FIM) Project
• Provide expertise to develop and deploy LAPS and the WRF for additional applications, including Renewable Energy, Fire Weather, Homeland Security, hurricane model initialization, etc., as newly funded projects and other initiatives arise. Improvements in model initialization and cycled runs will be explored.
• Development of Nonhydrostatic Icosahedral Model (NIM) for kilometer-scale resolution on multiple graphical processing units; explicit prediction of small-scale weather systems such as topographic precipitation as well as convective macro-phenomenon like the MJO; diagnosing and resolving atmospheric phenomenon using the NIM modeling system.
• Refinement and enhancement of the Rapid Refresh, High Resolution Rapid Refresh (RAP and HRRR) and development of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model.
• Development and support of the Finite-volume Flow-following Icosahedral global NWP model (FIM).
• Technical support for the Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) Rapid Refresh (RR) and High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) Models Project including creation and management of automated scripts that generate real-time graphics of output fields, management of web-sites for display of those graphics, and management of graphics for hallway public displays.
• Study improvements to analysis techniques, diabatic initialization and balance package, WRF model initialization, as well as model forecast verification at the Taiwan Central Weather Bureau.
• Continue long-term collaboration with GSD to have LAPS / STMAS software running in the National Weather Service WFOs for evaluation and use by operational forecasters in both AWIPS and AWIPS II.
• Support HMT operations in California as part of HMT-WEST legacy but similar effort, including support of the analysis and modeling system, will continue in support of the California Dept. of Water Resources (DWR). Furthermore, CIRA will participate in support of the analysis and forecast systems as well as model forecasting, including ensembles, for the HMT-EAST field project.
• Provide project management support for independent assessments of the quality and skill of aviation weather forecast products transitioning to FAA or NWS operations
• Continuation of the development of the Network Enabled Verification Service (NEVS), which is intended for transition to the National Weather Service (NWS) as an operational system
• Extend AWIPS II capabilities in order to handle the demand for more and larger datasets

• Promoting Education and Outreach on Behalf of NOAA and the University
• Regional to Global Scale Modeling Systems
• Data Assimilation
• Climate-Weather Processes
• Data Distribution

---